Gee, Rapp, you seem to have an obsessive preoccupation with your delusions about my genitals. Maybe you should get help, but not from me. Much too far, anyway. I suppose imaginary chimps is bad enough, but chasing after imaginary phalli is a bridge too far, my friend.

That is not to imply that YOU have a "social disease", Amos. I'm sure that those are not luetic lesions. They're almost certainly just epidermal vesicular eruptions, purulent exudate from duct punctum due to sialadenitis or even something as simple as mycobacterium lepromatosis. So don't worry about it. I didn't mean to say anything bad about your health habits.

Stripers, to other folks, Amos. And a little mercury is good for you -- helps you come back together when you've gone off in all different directions. It'll also cure your, your, ah, social diseases -- you know the old saying, "A night with Venus and a lifetime with Mercury." I don't have, and never have had, that problem -- I'm just dropping a hint for you.

Heard a brief word from Sev Friday morn. Had to see to Mum in 5 minutes. Came back for a cup of tea and messaged I had to go back for a couple of hours to do housework. He said we'd chat when I wasn't all Mum'd up. Typical Sev, eh? Hehehehe.

I never was a fan of autographs or such. I was never star struck. But, when I picked that puppy... a GAME JERSEY... a GAME!!! jersey... from the AFC championship!!!... out of my mailbox today, I felt like a little kid at Christmas!

I have been all over town visiting friends. Jacket fully zipped up and doing the striptease stuff... slowly, until I bare the autograph. Then I point to the messed up threads and say, "Courtesy of the Baltimore Ravens."

Yeah... it sounds silly, even to me in a way... but... little kid feelings seriously!

Most will probably have heard about the cruise ship that was stranded for a while, and the "inconveniences" suffered by the passengers.

A new note on the event:

Stepping off the Carnival Triumph ? the filthy, sweltering cruise ship that was stranded in the Gulf of Mexico for five days after an engine fire knocked out power ? wasn't the end of the travel nightmare for some passengers.

A bus carrying Triumph passengers from Mobile, Ala., where the ship docked late Thursday, to New Orleans broke down Friday, Carnival Cruise Lines confirmed to NBC News.

Yes, it has incredible, silent strength...rather like a Dachshund who is slowly taking over the center of the bed by shoving you over to the edge...

Amos, I keep waiting for the day when you will moult, thus becoming unable to swan for a period of time until your new feathers come in. Nice alliterative bloviation in that last post! Not even Septimus Bilgeroar himself could do better than that.

Ten feet wide and the water will do the work for you. Even a foot wide if it were a few feet down from the top. Don't make it more difficult to destroy the dam than it needs to be.

(I've walked levees during floods on the Mississippi and very, very much respect the power that water has in destroying things designed to stop it from going where it wants to go and doing what it wants to do.)

I'm semi-familiar with the Dambusters raids, Rap, but what I had in mind was a 300 foot wide hole that goes all the way through the front of the dam. I mean "wide" from left to right...not necessarily the same dimension in terms of depth from front to back.

It would depend upon where the hole was, of course. Near the bottom a 300 foot wide hole would certainly affect the dam's integrity but might not compromise it to any disastrous extent because of the thickness of the base (remember, it's rather wedge-shaped). It would also make a difference on which side the hole first appeared -- it would be far more of a problem on the upstream side, as water, being incompressible, would hammer against the weakened structure after being "blown back" away from it and thereby cause greater damage than the initial hole would have been. For more information you might check out Operations Chastise and Catechism, carried out by the RAF in WW2, and the operation of the limpet mine.

Yeah, Blind River is sort of like a wide spot in the road. It probably started the way most small communities did, around a convenient watershed, that being the river that bisects the town. Back then it must have been a peaceful place full of wildlife and beautiful scenery. Indians most likely lived there in those days. Eventually the Whites came along and displaced the Indians, built some cabins and a church and a general store. Generations came and went, and the town slowly grew. Then one day a dark cloud was seen to cover the sky, and an ill wind blew from the East...bringing....

The McBrides! (crash of ominous piano chords)

These shambling ne'er-do-wells and thieving illiterate scum had been driven from their native homes in Ireland during the mid-1800s and had sought refuge from capture and summary justice by fleeing across the gray Atlantic to the far distant shores of Canada. After having alienated themselves in a series of deeply offended communities that stretched all the way from Newfoundland to Eastern Ontario, the surviving McBrides finally found themselves a new home in Blind River. And the place has gone downhill ever since! Alcoholism is rampant, as is teenage pregnancy. Growing pot is the leading cottage industry. The prevalence of extreme stupidity combined with an overweaning sense of entitlement and a penchant for committing reckless acts with no logic or foresight while operating motor vehicles has resulted in a drain on the social services and the justice system which is comparable to what would happen if someone blew a 300 foot wide hole in the Grand Coulee Dam.

What did I think you meant? Well, sir, I thought you were careening around in your usual frenzy of fantastical lascivious debauchery and lecherous license, of course, what do you think? Rather like Shane, who has pictured himself in all sorts of intimate situations with the same woman, a woman he is as incapable of understanding or relating to as a pig would be when confronted with the writings of Thomas Aquinas.

I'm glad to see that I was mistaken. I hope you learned something useful in the encounter.

An interesting look at a town that appears to be a wide spot in the road. And why bother to give the restaurant a name? "Restaurant" takes care of all of the information anyone needs. (Down the street from the Library.)

HAH! Jennifer Dana is quite well read and we discussed everything from global economic markets to Pre-Raphealite poetry and art. Her analysis of "Twelfth Night" was masterly (mistressly?) and she has been preparing a little monograph comparing the the psychology of Canadian and American low-level street criminals that should be extremely well received.

When I left she was intellectually sated -- whatever did you think I meant?

Officer Dana was so smitten by my good looks and animal magnetism that she invited me to move on...into her apartment for an intimate dinner and intimate intimacies. When I left her, her appetites had been sated.

You know, if he'd ask nicely and told them he was doing research about porn on the Internet they probably wouldn't have gotten so upset. Of course, it's easy to become upset with someone like Shame. (That's not him, Shame has far fewer teeth.)

Yes, that is the famous "liberry" where Shane has had numerous adventures over the years, including the final disastrous incident where he resisted arrest by several extremely irritated police officers by climbing on top of the bookshelves and hurling hardbound books down at them. This was after the "liberrians" had attempted to kick Shane out for surfing Internet porn on library time. He made a big scene about his "rights", so they called the police. The rest is history.

Shane has been limited to begging Don's girlfriends for use of their iPads and similar digital devices since the Great Liberry Fiasco.

Right next door to the library, you can see Michou's Country Treasures, a charming little gift shop that Shane has never entered.

"They ain't flippin' got nothin' in there!"

So...he's never been inside Michou's. He did throw up on their front entrance once, though...after getting kicked out of the Iron Horse.

And you're right about Officer Dana, Amos. She should move to Toronto...or better yet, the nation's capital: Ottawa, a much more interesting and likable place than "the Big Smoke" (Toronto). Toronto was a great city in the 60s and early 70s, but it's turned into on oversized, conjested urban hell since, by Canadian standards at least.

Yes, it is. As Shane would say, "You can, like, take THAT to the bank, eh?" Blind River. Love it or leave it. Neil Young once mentioned Blind River in a song...I think the title of the song is "Long May You Run"...a nostalgic look back at a car he drove way back in his teen years. He seems to have lived in Blind River for awhile or at least was visiting there. Rick Fielding once even played a gig in Blind River, so he told me. At the hotel. And survived!

What a god-forsaken second-rate burg. Shane should be ashaned of being part of such a pathetic little burble of civilization. Officer Dana too. You can tell she was cut out for better things just looking at her underwear in the spin cycle at the local Laundromat.

That gives you the satellite shot of Blind River. Now go in close and search for the "Iron Horse Inn, 24 Woodward Avenue, Blind River". The Iron Horse is one of Shane and Don's favorite watering holes. There's a stunning example of artwork on the front wall by the same guy who painted the art on one of Don's pickup trucks. Shane would like to do that kind of art too, mostly of semi-naked girls and dragons and demons and related stuff, but he's so far been too lazy to learn how, so he simply dreams about doing it, kind of like playing air guitar.

How many times does one have to swan to reach a sense of completion, Amos?

It's true, Blind River is a pretty dead place, but is that really their fault? I think it's more a problem of their geographical location than anything else. Then too, the economy has been depressed lately. When you live in a place that's too far north, too far away from any real center of culture, and there's not a hell of a lot to do except drink, have sex, get high, and commit random acts of reckless stupidity (like driving your snowmobile out on the lake), what else can you expect?

You should look up Blind River on Google Earth, take a look around the place, have a gander at the actual Tim Horton's Donut Shop which Shane patronizes, and check out the Iron Horse Tavern where he goes to see the Wet T-Shirt contests. You'll be impressed!

A great many things occur in Blind River every day, Amos, but most of them are quite mundane. People wake up grumpily to their alarm clocks (if they're employed), stagger to the washroom, brush their teeth, stagger to the hall, put on their lumberjack jackets and their baseball caps, go outside and start up the pickup truck, clear off the snow and ice from the windows, stop off at the Tim Horton's Drive-Thru for a quick coffee and breakfast, then go to work, etc....

Blind River had a very exciting time a couple years ago when Shame McBride flushed his stash and caused the sewers to back up and act as geysers in every drain in town. It wasn't a very big stash, but it was such bad stuff that even the sewers threw up. That was the official explanation given by the Blind River Sanitary and Sewer Commission and it was backed by whatever the Canadians call their version of the EPA. Unfortunately (for Shame) he was partaking of the facilities at the time and it acted as a gigantic enema on him -- the jail hasn't been the same since.